Bill Keller is upset with President Obama. In an opinion piece at Politico Monday, the former executive editor of the New York Times notes that Obama has embraced criminal justice reform, rhetorically and in practice. Then he asks, “So how come he’s freed so few prisoners?”
Keller, who now writes for the Marshall Project, a nonprofit nonpartisan online journalism organization covering criminal justice reform, says that Obama fully supports the idea that America incarcerates too many people for too long. “And yet,” Keller writes about Obama, “as he approaches his own last-minute frenzy of requests for clemency, Obama’s record so far — counting commutations and pardons — lags behind every recent president except George H.W. Bush, who had only a single term.”
